Wednesday, June 19, 2013

YA Guy Reviews... ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE by Benjamin Alire Saenz

Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s YA novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of
the Universe is, simply, a beautiful book. It’s also a beautifully simple
book. YA Guy admires the heck out of writers who can express so much in such
straightforward, clean prose; I tend toward the baroque and the extravagant,
and I sometimes feel I say less with more.But not Sáenz.

The story he
tells is classic coming-of-age material: two Mexican-American teenagers,
Aristotle (the brooding narrator) and Dante (his chatty best friend), learn
about life and love during several momentous summers, both together and apart.
Aristotle is dealing with lots of demons: a father who won’t talk about his
traumatic experience in Vietnam, an older brother who’s imprisoned and whom
the family never mentions, a near-deadly accident that turns him into a
reluctant hero. Dante seems to have things much easier: openly loving parents,
artistic talent, an easy manner of being around others. But Dante has his own painful
secret, and it’s one only Aristotle knows.

He’s gay.

I won’t tell you
all the twists and turns in the book; you’ll love discovering them for
yourself. And you’ll also love Sáenz’s
prose, which offers pearls like this on practically every page:

Do you know what dead skin looks like when
they take off a cast? That was my life, all that dead skin.

For a few minutes I wished that Dante and I
lived in the universe of boys instead of the universe of almost-men.

I decided that maybe we left each other
alone too much. Leaving each other alone
was killing us.

I think my mother and father had decided
that there were too many secrets in the world.

If I have any
reservation about Aristotle and Dante
Discover the Secrets of the Universe, it has to do with the book’s
conclusion, which I felt moved too fast and provided too pat a resolution to
Aristotle’s crisis. But overall, if you’re looking for a book that explores the
painful process of growing to manhood, Aristotle
and Dante is one of the finest I’ve read in a long time.

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YA Guy Is...

I'm a guy who writes YA fiction. My science fiction duology, SURVIVAL COLONY 9 and SCAVENGER OF SOULS, is out now from Simon & Schuster. A new novel, the deep-space adventure FREEFALL, came out in 2017.